The Travel Marketing Podcast

This is the travel marketing podcast brought to you by Propellac, bringing you the news and insights and what's working and not working in today's competitive transportation and tourism landscape. From emerging brands to the most established professionals, these lessons of intelligent marketing will help your marketing plan travel further.

So we finally made it, Leigh. Thank you so much for joining me here today.

Hey, Brennen. Thank you for having me here. Appreciate it, man.

So the recording date here is in Melbourne. Well, you're in Melbourne. Right?

Yep. I'm in the future. That's right. It's Thursday 28th. So yeah.
The future looks cool for me, man. Yeah.

You're celebrating American Thanksgiving the day before I am. Amazing. There you go.
Well, I'm really excited to dive in. For anybody listening who's not familiar with Intrepid, this is, welcome to 2024, but also, this is a really exciting company and really interesting seeing you Leigh in your growth within the company over the years. And I'm really interested in that my goal with this conversation is both centered around all of the expansion that Intrepid's doing into the US, but also talk a little bit more about your marketing philosophy. And there's one key point that my team gathered when doing some research to prepare for this, and it's the split that Intrepid has between brand and performance marketing. Travel as an industry is addicted to performance marketing. This is why Google does so well in that category, right?

Yeah. I'm curious to hear a little bit more about your philosophy around that.

Totally. Tell me, you want me to kick off, Brennen, you want me to talk about the performance and brands?

We're going right, we're going straight into the meat here.

Good. Now I thought you might float a little bit more, a little bit more warm up.

Oh, no.

Get there, but you've got straight in.

You don't know me well enough clearly.

Yeah. Look, I'll tell the story effectively COVID happened., yeah, so about 90% of our marketing mix pre COVID was performance. Yeah. So social PPC, programmatic, whatever you wanna stroll into that bucket, email, database, all that sort of stuff. Pandemic happens. It's very tough to be a travel company when there's no travel.

You can't leave Australia or the UK or US, wherever it was. But, effectively, overnight, our traffic just completely dropped. Revenues went from a record year to, you know, in $100 of millions of dollars to, like, 20 or 30 just completely changed the landscape.

And what I learned at that time frame is really the big punch in my face was, what we have left is our brand, right? And that's the thing we could tell stories about, talk about. We could tell the great purpose initiatives we're doing around how we treat our people, what we do on climate, diversity, inclusion. We also tell a great story, but that happens throughout trips, highlighting the brand, and telling these stories.

Performance marketing at that point was useless. So there was that moment where I was like, oh, what have we got? We should be focusing more on the stories of the brand. I did a hell of a lot of work, a lot of research, and a lot of reading, and there's great papers that basically tell you to spend 50/50.
There's already some searches by Liz Burnett, Mark Ritson, uncensored T Mobile podcast. There's amazing minds much smarter than me that basically said you should be spending half your money on brand, half your money on performance. You've got an obligation to grow the business into the future. Yeah. You don't just have a commercial responsibility to win now, like to speed marketing, you need to make sure there's enough people today, tomorrow, and 3 to 5 years that know your brand, and then you also have the capacity to commercially win today. Both things are super important. You can't just do one or the other. You need both because they work together. And for me, it was also about what legacy we wanted to have.

We wanted to create cool things. We wanted more people to know us. And if you fundamentally stop and just think about your own world, you purchase from brands you know and trust. You just do it.

You know these things. And so we took a big bet coming out of the pandemic. We just overnight changed our marketing. We rebranded, we spent a lot more money on out of home, radio, podcast, magazine, print, social influences, PR, all of these things.

And our financial performance ever since that, we've delivered record year on record year. This year, we're on track for record profit, record bookings, record NPS, higher aided awareness. More people know Intrepid today than ever before. So yeah, and we just continue to believe that it's the right way.

You need more people to know who you are to continually grow. And too much of marketing was focused on reporting analysis on today, not on the future. Yet too much was just looking at what happened today. So our focus now very much is making sure enough people know, care, and buy from Intrepid today and into the future.

So acknowledging that I'm a horrible interviewer and started right deeply into the meat.
So you talked about brand. Y'all have done a huge brand campaign. I'm gonna spend some time on them in a second, the most recent one that you launched this Q3 this year. But before we do that, I do wanna take a step back and acknowledge some of the special things about Intrepid that you don't necessarily see necessarily in the adventure travel world or anywhere in travel, and it's the focus on community based. It's the focus I mean, you're a certified B corp with specific pillars that are really loud and really important to y'all, clearly.

You know, we've got 45 minutes today. So my goal, my responsibility with this podcast is to help up level junior marketers and senior marketers in the travel space. That's my goal. So we could spend a lot of time on story, and there's plenty of places to do that. But I think here, let's spend maybe 3 minutes talking a little bit about the differentiators, both in their ability to help you with your marketing messaging, but also just what differentiates and what makes Intrepid special starting with B corp status.

Yeah. So for those who don't know B corp effectively is a certification that says you're using your business as a force for good. Yeah, so it goes in, doesn't audit your organization, and gives you the base stamp that you can whack on your brand and your business to say, we look after the communities that we travel in in the right way. We engage and look after our people, our employees.
You do the same with the planet. We have clear governance and transparency, and it's a framework that helps you audit and understand your business. And then also showcase where you need to get better. Yeah. Like, if there's an area around how you might contract, how you might use renewable energies, how you know, these different things for your business, and it gives you a pathway to make that improvement.

So we've really lent into the B corp methodology because it enables you to do an audit on all the parts of your business beyond just the financial metrics. Yeah. Just the way you would from your finances, say, what are we doing right? What are we doing wrong? Where do we need to make improvements?

B corp enables us to do that. And a really great simple example of where we've used B corp to drive improvements. We do a lot of work around community tourism. As you touched on, we want to make sure we have a social license to operate, so we need the communities to want us to be there. As a tourism company, if we don't have a healthy planet and we don't have communities that want us there, we're in strife.

Yeah. We need the communities wanting us to travel and engage. One of the things we do a lot of is, like, homestays or, you know, home cooking experiences. And through the B corp process, we usually would have previously have the contract with the head of the household, which was a male rather than with the woman who was generally running these products. And so they didn't have the self determination, ownership of the product that they're creating, when they worked, how they worked.

B corp gave us that focus we needed to make that shift, and we've since changed how we've done our contract.

So something like that came out in the audit?

Yes. There's hundreds of examples like that that it helps us continually get better because we don't know what we don't know, and we're trying and pushing ourselves forward. So it's a really good trust mark for consumers to say, hey if this organization has done this, they've, you know, they're doing the right thing and they're continually trying to get better in what they need to do. So, yeah, it's a really important market for us. It highlights that we do a lot of the right stuff. We're always striving to get better. We're not perfect. Do not for a moment think we're perfect.
This stuff we always need to get better at, but this also gives us a framework to say, hey, are you looking after your employees in the right way?
You may need to sharpen that up. What's your contracting like? How are you showing up in marketing? One of the other big changes, well, I think we might can just say, but we can talk about it now. It really gave us the time to stop and pause and say, look, are we marketing ethically and diverse enough for our customer set?

And were we representing the breadth of customers that wanted to experience our style of travel? And we're very open. We wanna be inclusive and believe that travel is for all, and, you know, it is a privilege and not a right, but all types of people travel, and we weren't probably representing that in our marketing. So through the B corp methodology, we set about building our first ever ethical marketing guidelines. And that was a series of commitments and steps to say, Hey, we're going to contract and employ first nations, Australian first nations influences or creators.

We're going to work with more YPOQ creators. You're gonna make sure that we're discussing and writing in a inclusive way, and we've set those guidelines up. So, yeah, it's a really good framework to help you grow and make improvements.

So for anybody listening, I also had the opportunity to interview, I think, the Global Head of PR, Mikey Sadowski on the podcast. It was early on in this podcast world.

So it's probably one of the first five episodes. But if anybody's curious, we'll link to it in the comments or in the show notes, essentially. We probably spent 5 or 10 minutes talking about the ethical marketing guidelines that y'all had.

And Mark, he led that word. Yeah.

Yeah. So continuing on this nonsensical stream of consciousness that I've created, I'm curious to hear a little bit about how you measure the impact of those guidelines, of those frameworks that you created, and specifically or more broadly rather, just brand marketing. What is your model for attribution and your model for understanding how effective that is?

So it does take a little bit of a reframe because we were so focused on ROAS, CPC, ROI.
And look sure that helps you understand the performance of your performance marketing. But it doesn't help you lift your eye line and say, do more people know and care about my brand. And that's the thing you've gotta be remembering here, you need people to know who you are. You need them to have a care and emotion, like a thing that they like and feel about you or a way that they remember you in our brain structures.

Cause there's so many things hitting us. And then when they go to purchase, you need to be in the consideration set. Yes. So you need to do it, when they go, I am going to do this thing. I then go to work.

And then you've got to win on a whole bunch of other things, but the other 3 things that we're trying to make happen. And we had to reframe how we looked at the metrics and what we did. The couple of things that we did is we're trying to understand, do more people know and do they care what emotions they have about Intrepid? One of the ways we've done that is we've now started to use a tool called Qualtrics to help measure our aided awareness. And are we getting growth around aided awareness?

So we have goals that tell us more people know Intrepid. Yeah. And we're trying to grow that each year. Then through that reporting, it also gives us insights to say, people know you because of X, Y, Z, but they also know your competitors because of X, Y, Z. You know, is that good? How do you make that work? So broad understanding around the emotions and feelings and category reminders that customers have more, why they're remembering us. So we manage to look at that. So really one is around whether more people know Intrepid and then what emotions and what feelings they've got. So we're trying to understand that early, then we just have classic metrics.

So we look at, are we getting more branded search terms in the cities that we're doing brand work in? So quite simply more people searching for our brand where we're advertising. Yep. Is that increasing? And then also, do we see better conversion in the cities that we're doing brand work?
Why is that important? Because this is a long tail way of looking at it because you should see if more people trust and know you, that your conversion in those markets will increase, but it doesn't really happen straight away. So we look at that. That's more like a hard metric. I mean, well, when people search you, it needs your conversion in those cities increasing so we really manage those. And then 2 other big things for us is customer growth. Are you growing the amount of people that are booking every day, and what is your profitability at? Yeah. Because if you're able to continually grow your brand, you should be more profitable, and there should be more customers coming through your business.

These things aren't gonna match up. Like, I did brand at the moment, is our customers up today? You've got to sort of balance this 2 speed approach like, Hey, are we winning today? Super important.
Like what's the ROI on this? What's the ROI what's happening today? Are we winning at it? Then with my eyes, am I doing enough to make sure I win Q2, Q3, Q4, 2 years away? Cause a lot of the work you're doing now is setting people to know you for the future.

And that's super important as well. So it's balancing both of those things. So it's a bucket of metrics around. Are you healthy for the future? Another buck of metrics is saying, are you winning today and doing everything you can to win on the commercial side?

And it's a lift of incrementality too that's visible that you've talked about in the destinations where you are in the source markets where you are advertising. And I was just in one of them. Actually, I just flew back from New York.

Let's pivot a little bit to this brand campaign. So tell me, are these numbers accurate?
I actually don't know where my team pulled these from, but it said 150,000,000 was your sales. I don't know if that's this or last year. And the target's 500,000,000 in the US specifically. So 500 is where we want to get to by 2,030 out of the US this year. We'll do about that 130,000,000 give or take out of, out of that market, which since 2018 is about 80 to 90% uplift, since 2018.

And then just quick off the shooting from the hip. Like I get I'm in Texas. So shooting from the hip is one of my terms that I use, I guess, But shooting from the hip, what do you think were the levers that allowed that to happen? What took you from 90 to a 180 or if I did my math right? Yeah.

Yeah. Over that time, I think there's a couple of key things. One is storytelling. So our PR and social engine has changed drastically over that time. You know, we will probably have, you know, we'll have almost a 1,000 hits in a month from a PR perspective, like stories being told about Intrepid, which has been absolutely huge.

And then also our social media completely changed over that time. So we went from basically destination marketing, like, here's a pretty picture of Machu Picchu or now it's people first person narratives around. This is me in China. This is what I love. This is what I hate. This is what I did. Whether that's our customers, whether it's influencers or creators or other people of influence, we've really changed that narrative and it's been more storytelling. So we've drastically increased our social reach and our PR with a big focus on telling Intrepid stories.

This is amazing. I'm taking a soapbox moment.

I'm so happy to hear that. We just released last Tuesday a report with PhocusWright, a white paper based on their consumer travel research. Their consumer travel report for 2024 and the level of influence that you see from what to do in the destination, not the destination itself, 1st and foremost. And then secondarily, user generated content and the leverage that you get from whether it's micro influencers or directly through your consumers being the most powerful marketing messaging, especially when they can see themselves in the media.

Yeah, totally, but more people telling your story is powerful. Like your own channels can only go so far. Like, they can only do so much. So the more people are telling your story via whatever vertical or channel that you deem important for your audiences, it's gonna be different for everyone.
It's so powerful. Yeah. Because you can only post so often, you can only pace. If you get all these people out sharing, telling that story, super powerful, just such an amazing way. So that's been a drastic change, and whether it's media or social, that storytelling.
And then we have made big commitments to represent the brand and shop in the biggest cities in the world. So, you know, you'll see us on the tube in London. You'll see us at Madison Square Garden in the US. You'll see us on a tram in Melbourne. Like, just big iconic things.

So more people know us and see us and talk about us. I think one of the biggest learnings that no one talks about are 2 biggest things from the brand work that no one talks about. You won't see in any report, your level of influence increases. So you're a real company as much as digital marketing does great stuff in this group of ones there, you're still not salient as real in the same way as if you shop in real with some brand moments, whether they're events or advertising or these bigger things, same with press, it shows you you're real and the amount of B2B business and people that reach out to us because of this. And the amount of awards we've won since we've done this has been skyrocketed.
Yeah. That impact has been amazing. And then the pride from our people and our staff and our customers has been huge. Like people share, hey, I saw Intrepid on the subway. I just now I've got my photo of me with the tram in Melbourne or, hey, here's the Intrepid book.

I'm, you know, reading it for the first time. I've given it to my mom for her birthday. It's level of pride. I'm a digital market by trade. You don't get the same thing, no one's sharing the PPC ad that just delivered that last quick with me. You know, my dad brutally on it. It does the job, right? But it doesn't have that state of impact.

So they've got a place, but you've got to realize what are you trying to do if you spend what's gonna happen. So I think the big focus on storytelling, that big focus on the brand work. And then finally, the other big thing that we've changed is a customer first mentality. So we've built a global customer care team. We have the voice of a customer program.

We're always trying to make it easier for our customers to purchase from us. What barriers can we remove? How can we service them better? So I think a cocktail of those, Brennen, is the reason why we've been able to grow so well, and we're on track again for another record year of, you know, profit, customer growth, sales.

Okay.
So we're talking a lot about this campaign. We just you just mentioned the Intrepid book. Let's do campaign first. What's the messaging? What's, like what was the campaign, the most recent one?

Yeah. So the campaign's only Intrepid. It's been a global campaign, in our major markets, the USA, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand. And it has been a full campaign across all assets owned, paid, our website. Everywhere you should show up that we should see only Intrepid.

And really what we wanted to do was highlight the amazing experiences that you can have only with Intrepid. And we really wanted to focus on the great experiences and the way of our travel and why it's so amazing. So you'll see, advertising for dancing with the Moroccan women's choir group. You'll see, you know, having dinner with a mirror in Greece. You'll see different elements that really bring to life, you know, going, you know, doing different aspects around the world.

So really focusing on these unique moments and highlighting that Intrepid was the way to make that happen. And we wanted to capitalize on the bigger focus on experiences. We're seeing more people wanting to travel for experiences. And one of the core competencies of Intrepid is the fact that our own and operate our own destination management networks, so we build and own and create the products. So that is the competitive advantage, and we wanted to highlight those things and bring to life the experiences that you could have on an Intrepid trip.

And not just showcase, which traditionally has been a lot of tourism advertising is is me at a location, Machu Picchu. Here's me at, Mona Lisa. You know what I mean? Like, if that's been a classic thing or he's just a beautiful beach. So we really wanted to bring to life the different experiences that you can have with Intrepid and bring those to life.

So that's been the essence of campaign. So far, it's performing the best of all of our brand campaigns we've had. We've had a really big jump in aided awareness over the last couple of months, which is really, really compelling and great for us. But, again, wanting people to have that emotional connection and feel those experiences and the things that you could only do with a trip.

So aided awareness, it's something that you've sort of mentioned a couple of times.
Let's say you have an uptick in aided awareness on day 0. What day following day 0 do you actually see that result in top line performance?

Poor. Great question. I wish I knew how to be brutally honest.
I think not. To be honest, like, what you say and what we generally say, and I don't know, this is a cop out of an answer. What we generally say is if your aided awareness increases in the month proceeding, so the 3 month period before big sales period. So, you know, what what are we generally now market say for out small group adventures? This big booking period around October to December, Jan March.
They are 2 of the biggest tops.

So things are very calm for you right now on November 27th?

Not really.. I don't know. My team's is, like, popping up, like, relentlessly here at the bottom right hand corner that no one can see is messages from the sales and marketing team and stuff going on.

As long as that's growing in the lead up to those, we will see, increased performance. Yeah. So it's not and also it's too hard. It's hard because, like, lead time on a product for Antarctica compared to Costa Rica, Peru. So generally, what I want to say is in the lead up to any big periods, a big period where we know we have large bookings in the marketplace, and we know that more customers are going to be shopping.

It is incredibly positive and powerful for more people to know and trust and feel something about Intrepid leaning into those booking periods. So I'd say, generally, you wanna see it increase 3 months beforehand, but it's going different for different companies, booking time for our customer journeys. All that sort of stuff is very different, but, you know, I like to have growth in the proceeding 3 to 6 months leading up into it because that's generally, you know, booking, you know, if I've gotta go, I'm flying from, you know, San Francisco to Vietnam. I've gotta make sure that the timing's right when I go, get my leave sorted flights. You know, like you need a bit of time. It's not as much that, you know, a lot of people that decide and click and book, but it's only a bit more considered. I've gotta get my holiday. My wife has to get her holiday. So, yeah, I don't have a hard date, but, generally, that's 3 months beforehand. You just want more people knowing you before that keep booking period.

Okay. I gotcha. Interesting. So you mentioned your team is popping up. We're leading it with Black Friday, Cyber Monday starting in 24 hours, right? And travel Tuesday when this is being recorded at least, not when it's gonna be released. The last two interviews, I believe, that we've done on this podcast with the CMO of Civitatis, which is a large single day OTA. And then WeRoad, which is a smaller version of what y'all do, which I'm sure you've heard of and might be familiar with.

Yeah. So I'm curious, like, the structure of the team that you've built, what that looks like to be able to manage the scope and scale of the marketing activity that you're doing across the world and all of these source and destination markets and what your reporting structure looks like. How do you manage that?

Yeah. Great question.
And it's always changing your trip. We're pretty dynamic companies. I'll say something here. We might change it in the next 3 to 6 months. But, generally, I have 2 components to my ringgit.

1, we have country managers, so people in the market are responsible for the sales and marketing operations of Intrepid. So in the UK, Australia, USA. Yeah. They're responsible. Markets.

Yeah. They're the source markets for customers. Yep. So they're responsible. I have dotted line managers then, so I work with them in a matrix style structure with those sales and marketing leads on ground.

So we have 3 of those, 1 for North America, 1 for UK and Europe, and one for ANZ. They have teams underneath them that are directly responsible for the marketing, sales component. And they each have, like, their own budget allocated and things of that nature. Budget allocated, yeah, based around a percentage of bookings depending on what we're trying to do in that particular market. And then I have direct reports to the platforms or central machine that powers Intrepid.

Yeah. Because we're a global company, we have customers from all these different places, over a 100 countries traveling at any given time. So my team's responsible for the shared platforms to fuel and power those regions, and I have direct one of those. So that will be brands and marketing, communications, PR, social, comms, CX, digital, website app, those type of things, and then customer insights. So sales, customer care, insights, all that sort of stuff.
And they are building the platforms for our teams in market to use UIs to grow. And because we're a global tool operator, we use a lot of shared platforms. We don't have different Instagram channel by country because if you were to go on that trip, you'll be on a trip with an American, Brit, a Swiss, Australian so you've got this shared platform and global communities. And then, so I have a core team that report into me, and then I have, total blind matrix reports that are responsible.

So central team building the platforms that grow the whole company use, and then regional country roles that are responsible for the point in sales, marketing, delivery in country, and they form my leadership team. So I would have those roles reporting up into me. Does that make sense?

It does make sense. And actually the question I've got written on my notes right here that really fits in nicely here. And it's how do you maintain consistency with team like your marketing? It's not siloed per se, but there's a part, right? And there's different, I would say, standards and sensitivities.

So I think there's some things that there is no wiggle room. Like, the brand is the brand, and it has to be delivered in that way. Pre pandemic will probably be a lot more looser than that, but no, it's very hard. If I have a brand that shows up differently in each country, and then you go on the same product and you've got completely different expectations. So we do have very clear consistency around our website, our brand, our look and feel now, how we might take that to market in each country will be different.

Yeah. And what those countries so, London, UK, London is the fastest way to get to meet people anywhere in the world. Yeah. So we do a lot more out of home to brand stuff there. Australia, it's largely just on the East Coast, Sydney and Melbourne.

So what we do there. In America, it's a lot more dispersed. We do a lot more podcast, do a lot more digital social media brand building, or how do you make those things happen? So it's different in how you shop in each market. Also in Australia, a large chunk of our business comes through trade partners.
So travel agents, how do we work and show up with them? So, yeah, shared platforms, consistency around look, feel, tone, those shared platforms. But then in market, it's your articulation on how you need to show up in your country to reach the customers you need to.

Got it. Okay.

So any methodology around prioritization of source and or destination markets?

So product you said prioritization full stop or prioritization of the markets?

I mean, when you enter your year so your fiscal year when is your fiscal year? Like, what is your planning?

So our calendar, calendar year.

We're a calendar year. Okay. So you're probably already done with a lot of your 2025 planning, if not all of it. How did you go about prioritizing the markets you were gonna focus on? I know America is a huge focus for y'all as a source market, but how about the markets you're selling in the US, the ones that you're putting on those media campaigns?

Yeah. So we will always try to grow the big markets. So North America, UK, Australia, they're all priorities. The most opportunity we believe is in the USA.
We believe that it's the far everyone that believes it is our fastest growing, and we believe there's the most opportunity in the US, especially, for our style of product. How do we decide what cities we're gonna go through? It's realistically looking at our current customer set, so where our current customers are coming from. So we believe that there's more opportunity for that customer set because you see, as you get a lot of customers in one place, word-of-mouth starts to generate. So if you can do more and has this, like, fueling effect, you know, say Ontario, California, New York, currently really big in majority of Intrepid customers come out of those 3 key markets. We continue to do more there, and they grow faster than other markets. Then we look at where do we think we should be growing more. Probably not growing enough in the Pacific Northwest, probably not doing enough in, you know, Austin. Like, where are these other pockets of the world that we think that have the right, you know, customer sets? And then we'll start to make them as, like, a growth opportunity.

So our 3 big key ones are currently growing, and that's where we get a bit most of our growth. And the more we do, the more they grow faster. And then we're looking at a couple of key places based on what we think is where the most Intrepid people are. How do we grow that? Because the more people travel, they tell their friends, and we grow from there.

So and in the USA, it's probably a bit more complicated than the other markets because we need to go. What's got great flight routes. Can I get to the places? America has extra complexity of, you know, just to say Austin, like, if you've got to get to the next hub, how do you get there? Is even going to connect properly to the next place in Africa, Latin America, Australia.
How do you do that? So it's like trying to work out these key places and you know, where we've got great connections to get people out and do that. So…

Yeah, Europe's easier.

Yeah. Totally.

Yes. Exactly. Exactly. And that's why I've seen really big growth in Southern and Eastern Europe and Morocco because they are easier to get to. I flew and bigger growth improved.

What did I do? I flew from London to Austin yesterday, and that's a new-ish route. And it's, like, so nice to not have to make 2 stops on the way home from the UK. And so Austin should probably be a bigger growth for us to, you know, even get into Europe and North Africa from there quite easily, you know? Like, it's just those considerations.

Yeah. And Austin has absolutely like, and they were just some routes that were cut by American Airlines. Austin has such an interesting flight demographic. There's a lot of business here, a lot of like creative business. So it's like different than standard business routes, but it's still business travel. So that's the routes they designed typically. It's very odd. But in any case, I'm curious that one of my favorite questions, a little bit of a non sequitur, which is my style today, apparently. I'm curious, what is a marketing campaign or marketing something that costs a lot of money and failed miserably?

In my whole life, you were here like a bad one.
I'd like previously, about 10 years ago, completely rebranded one of our products, geckos, which no longer exists. It was a basics offering. And we used some swearing in the advertising and went very bullshit people under 35. And it was the biggest campaign I've ever done at that point as a young marketer. So big budget, big brand shift, and really lofty, sales goals, and it completely tanked at the time.

And I think I still the work I'm probably most creatively proud of, but it's the one that I had to grow up a lot around understanding business. I was probably naive at that point to think, oh, marketing and brand and telling the right story, the customer fixes everything. Product wasn't right. The pricing wasn't right. We didn't have strong distribution.
All the business stuff that needed to go into it wasn't built around this brand that we built.

It was a complete almost disconnect from this vision that we've given the world to what we were actually able to deliver, and I, got a kick of the pants in the face however you wanna that that it did not work, and you spent a lot of money on it. And I was naive that I thought at that point in my career that marketing can solve everything. You know, it can get more people to know and care about you, but if you don't have the foundations of making it easier for your customer, having the right product, getting the price right, and then having great sales, partnerships, relationships, and how customers can purchase, It's a bit irrelevant, and, yeah, it completely tanked. And I I do have some time photos.
Might lose my job. It was, you know, quite a stressful time. I made some bad mistakes, but, yeah, I think the marketing was right, but I didn't get all the other stuff. And a lot of people probably forget about this in marketing is you're also responsible for communicating and intersecting with the whole company. And a lot of the great things that you can do as marketers with the insight knowledge you have is impact price, make sure you're working the right partners, getting the product to fit with the brand.

Like there's so much other stuff. I think we speak so much about the brand articulation and advertising or PR or social, all this stuff. A lot of your remit as a marketer should be understanding the customer and then working with the business to influence price, product, your sales distribution. How do these things work together? Because it's all super part of your brand.

Your brand isn't just the ad. I think my biggest learning from that was great. You do this creative work, was cool. Whatever. You didn't do the other half of your job. I mean, that was making sure that there was product market fit. The price was right. Your partners were you brought into it. Your people understood it.

And that's really one of the biggest awakenings for me is my job isn't just the external articulation of what we do. It's also making sure that the business is getting the insights that we're getting as marketers as cultural Not a physio, as it sounds horrible, but like listeners, you know, we're responsible for understanding our customers and what's happening in culture. Because other big part of your job, which we seem to forget about talking about is like, are we looking after the customer? Are we, you know, making sure these other things are happening? So big f up.

Massive learnings. It made me a lot better marketer today.

Alright. Yeah. I think you touched on a little bit one of the things we see specifically with channel experts.
You didn't see it as much in paid media, but you see it definitely in social and SEO is understanding how a business works broadly.

Yeah.

And what's required to make the traffic that you're driving actually do something meaningful.

Yeah. And it's been my biggest link to because the better relationship you can have with the CFO, like, quite often I hear because, finance doesn't get it. They don't give you your job as a marketing leader is to get people to get it and to understand it.
And that for me has been one of my most powerful learnings is my job is as much the marketer externally, but the marketer internally in the business to understand why I'm doing what I'm doing and get these people bought on the other parts of this. It's not their responsibility. It's your responsibility. And I think for me, it's been one of the most powerful learnings in my career that I've got that responsibility to make sure other people understand buy in and learn about the business.

Yeah.

It can be as simple as teaching someone internally what a gross margin means versus revenue. That's one of the things, like, when I'm building my company and, you know, we've got 20 something people on the team, it's the goal is we wanna hire people that understand what it takes to move a business forward, not just to drive traffic. So it seems, sounds like a fairly painful way to learn it.

Oh, yeah. And I was young and naive and the company probably was a bit young and naive too. And one of the amazing news in trippiness, you do get opportunities probably above your station, but I've always found the company support you and how should you grow and get better at these sort of things. So, yeah.

Yeah. And you can fail, but still have the ability to try again.
That is a special thing. Pivoting a little bit to the travel purchase journey. You mentioned this is a considered purchase. You had to line up your PTO. There's all these little things that happen, these micro moments that happen in the research journey for tours, anything that's considered.

Now, like, the thing that we deal with in travel is it's very messy and hard to attribute and hard to track a lot of what happens in that process. But I'm just curious broadly, other than brand campaigns, how do you move people tactically from consideration to purchase?

Yeah. Good question. So I think one thing I'll say is, like, it's getting messy and messier and more and more confusing and harder.
But how do we move people from basically knowing us to purchasing? Yeah.

So what we have is what we call a connection strategy, and that's how we connect with customers at different parts of the journey. So what message should we be speaking to that customer to at that point in time, whether it's through email, whether it's through written communications, whether it's creating other products. That's part of the reason why we've made the Intrepid book.
Yeah. Because we wanted to have another way to engage with customers. Customers roughly tell, like, a super loyal customer probably travels with us once every 700 days. We wanted to create a way to engage with them more often. So we have the Intrepid book, which we've just launched, which means people, you know, can read, engage with us, another part of that touch point.

And we also have things like Urban Adventures, which you spoke which we've spoken about before, Brennen, is that's another way that someone can easily just, you know, go on a day tour and still connect with Intrepid. So we've got products that we're building and creating that help people engage throughout the customer journey between their next trip. So we keep looking at building those new products. Other things we're looking at, building podcast, film, all these other things that can get people engaged. And then through our connection strategy, it's how we show up to that customer at that different time.
So once they put a trip on the wish list, what information we serve them, what they're doing after they book, what what insights do we give them when they come back? So we're constantly talking to those customers through different advertising, different email messaging, different backgrounds on the website. Are we going to be launching an app next year as well that will help do that? So we have a what we call a connection strategy. It's about giving different messages to different customers at different times.

It'll vary depending on what product we are in the world and what interests are. That all leads up to your purchase. Then we have ways to get you excited before you trip and engage you on trip, which we'll be launching an app next year to help continue to bring that to life. Just simple things, you know, we want people wanting more to connect via an app when they're on the trip or find stuff I have through an app, which is probably wasn't happening 3, 4, 5 years ago. So how do we build that out for that customer?

And then once they've after they've traveled with us, we're looking at continuing creating other brand moments or products the customers can have to engage so they book again. And that seems like your trip at least. It's things like Urban Adventures. The customers can go on a day tour in their home city or when they're traveling on a different style of trip. So, yeah, different aspects depending on where customers are in the journey and what we're trying to achieve.

Got it. So, yeah, the touch point on journey is interesting. That's something that multi day has kinda struggled to do. I wanna ask these three questions really badly, and I don't think you'd be complete without them. Okay. So 1,300,000,000 by 2030, first by the end of 2030. Yeah? What's gonna make that not happen?

Oh, COVID? Again, COVID 2.0?

Okay.

No. Like No.

That is fair.

No. No. No. Sorry. So couple of things. I do think that one of the hurdles that we have in the travel sector, and this is historically true, is there are big events.

SARS, COVID, volcanoes, climate change. There are big things that disproportionately affect our sector, and we've seen blips, GFCs. They will happen. Something else would probably happen in the next 7 to 10 weeks. Yep.
So that is something that's, worth thinking about. I think the one that us really is at the point, you know, we're seeing impact us is climate change. Yeah. We're having probably as many climate incidences on trip in a month that we had in a year pre pandemic. So anywhere from 20 or 30, so that's whether it's floods, earthquakes, extreme heat, different climate events.

So that is a real concern. You know, we fundamentally believe we can't have a healthy travel company if we don't have a healthy planet. We're seeing that become a bigger issue. So I think if we continue to see the amount of climate disruption that could have an impact, that's why we're so passionate about it. But I think the 2 big things for me is, like, a big global event that happens every 7 to 10 years that interrupts the travel industry.
So how are we prepared? How do we navigate that? And then for us, we're really thinking about how we navigate climate change. That's why we're doing a lot more domestic products, so more products for Americans and Americans, Australians, and Australia. So people aren't travelling as far or able to stay in their country, which hope gives us some proof around if there is a COVID like event in the future where people can only travel in their own countries.

But, yeah, the climate stuff I think is omnipresent.

Okay. I have time. I'm gonna push a little harder. Bear with me for a second.

Okay. Okay.

This is between you, me, and, maybe a 1000 travel marketers at the very most.

Good. Good.

You just named 2 external things that could prevent it from happening. Yeah. What's an internal thing that could prevent it from happening? Oh, obviously, incompetency, but I've we've hopefully hopefully not. Like, no.

I think one of the things that we've done well is we've gotten out of our own way. Like, I do think it's a really issue, you know, like, internally, you get your own way is a big thing. So I think we've hurdled, jumped at her. I think the main thing that will our factors is, can we now the USA? Yeah.

So much of our opportunities in that market. We're very mature in Australia. You know, we've been here for 35 years. We're well known, well respected. We're seeing really good growth.

USA, we don't have that same luxury. And I think how we address that and deliver that internally, like, how we do that and set us up to win there is probably the biggest impact on where we're gonna get to that. So I think as long as we can give ourselves the space and and make that happen, we'll be in a good position. But it's probably the thing that I'm most, you know, thinking about before I go to bed or when I wake up during the night is can I deliver that in the USA?

Okay. Got it. That was an interesting segue into my last question because it's about the USA. And that was the plan the whole while, believe it or not.

Good. Good. I think I knew that, you know, somewhere deep in my.

Yeah. You thank you.
Maybe someday I'll just let you do these podcasts and I'll step up. So you're moving to the US. We work with a lot of companies.
So today, we just started working with a company that's a an OTA that's based in Sweden that's trying to target the US. There's a lot of companies that are not in the US that are trying to target the US. And the US, as you said, is a very difficult market. That's what I built Propellic to specialize in the US. I'm curious how you see moving to the US, establishing an office in the US versus trying to do it remotely changes the dynamic of what you're trying to accomplish and how presumably, you're doing it to improve things, not to make them worse.

So how does moving to the I'd say very yeah.

I'd say. Just, you know, trying to, like, make some wild unreasonable guesses here.

Why does Midland I did say incompetency is one of the biggest things that could get in our way. So, yeah, hopefully, I'm not going to get in the way and make that happen.

Yeah. Look. I think I spent a lot of time in Toronto previously in Canada building up our North America business. I spent about 5 years there. And I think probably one of my biggest mistakes was not pushing harder in setting up a part of the business in the USA.
I think a couple of key reasons why we need to be there is either we need more American staff that are working for Intrepid and are bought into the future of this company. And I think the more American people working for Intrepid that, you know, that in itself creates more Intrepid people, and they'll understand the market, our customers, how everything works better. So I want the next person to take over from my job to be an American, and I think building out a very good, stronger future leaders is one of the biggest opportunities and things that I'm most passionate about making happen in the USA. I think also to having a flag in the key city where you think you've got customers, there's a natural growth that comes from just being in that city, and we've seen that wherever we've been based. It's one of our best performing markets.
You know, there's a energy there's a connectivity. There's a word-of-mouth. There's an aspect of, you know, we're here. We're in the country vesting, you know, we're doing all the right stuff.
Just there's an actual growth that comes from being and showing up in a place. And, yeah, I I think if we're going to be serious about having, you know, over a 100,000 Americans travelling on our trips every year, that we should have a base there. And that it would help people trust us that we're, you know, investing in the country, you know, putting you know, spending money in the USA to make that happen. So yeah. And then I think I'm quite passionate too about, you know, the Pacific Northwest.
It is I think it'd be corridor for Intrepid cell travelers that we think is a big market there as well. So, yeah, I think if you broke it down to, what I have more great American people on board and part of the Intrepid story and owning the Intrepid story, I think by being there, there's a big opportunity to understand and speak to the customers. And then I think there's just the natural growth that comes from being in a in a big city and operating a business.

So it's not because of the direct flight to Australia?

Well, sure. Play it. Definitely some fun. Yeah. Well, I like after living in Toronto, it was much harder. So, yeah, I'm hoping the West Coast is a little less brutal on getting back.

And, yeah, it's not 27 hours. There's 32 hours of travel.

That's back to my early point. There is something in making sure you are to be a hub that can connect you to the rest of the world.

Absolutely.

And I think it's interesting because early on in the podcast, he specifically said that you think that there's a place to enrich and improve how you're doing in PNW. And you just also said that putting a flag down there improves that. So rubber's meeting the road.

I hope so. That's part of the plan.

My last question is unrelated to all of this. It's just because we're in the travel industry, an industry that's so incredibly able to open minds unlike any other industry that exists, and that's the reason that we're in business. That's our mission as an organization is to just open minds through the power of travel. I'm curious where you're going next. What's your next trip?

My next trip is to, Lawn in Australia. So it's down on the surf coast of Victoria to swim in a open water race from there. It's called the Peter Pub, and you swim about a kilometer from the pier into the pub, and it's a big open water race that happens down in Australia. So that's my next domestic trip, and then my next international trip will be to the USA in January. So got a little beach getaway here in Australia in a beautiful part of the world to do an open water swim and then heading over to the USA in January.

Well, a warm welcome to the US. We'll hopefully embrace you with open arms even more so because you're not choosing to move to New York. You're choosing to move with somewhere where people actually are nice. I'm sorry.

And, thanks so much for joining me today, Leigh.

I really appreciate it. Alright. No. Thank you, Brennen. I greatly appreciate it.

It's been fun.

For more empowering ideas, visit propelic.com. We're on a mission to create more diversity and thought for the planet and dedicated to helping brands both large and small increase their reach through intelligent travel, transportation, and tourism marketing. Propellic.com.